Marcos’ Crusade Against the Revolutionary Perspective

Communist Party of Mexico (ML)

Introduction

Twelve years ago, a revolt broke out in the south of Mexico, among
the poorest and most oppressed in a poor country. The revolt was timed
to mark the coming into force of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) on January 1, 1994, which opened Mexico to unbridled
exploitation by U.S. imperialism. The rebels seized five towns in the
largely indigenous state of Chiapas. Calling themselves the Zapatista
Army of National Liberation (EZLN), after Zapata, the peasant leader of
the Mexican revolution of 1910, their revolt galvanized the popular
forces throughout Mexico and gained the respect of progressive forces
throughout the world. Though the Zapatistas soon withdrew from the five
towns under pressure of the Mexican army, they waged a low-level
guerrilla war for several years and took part in mass political
campaigns.

But the hopes that the Zapatistas aroused in Mexico have
gone largely unfulfilled. Among other things, the Zapatistas, and
particularly their leader, Subcomandante Marcos, not only refused to
take up a vanguard role in the fight against the Mexican bourgeoisie,
but denied the need for such a vanguard at all. Also, Marcos now
portrays violence as the dark side of human history, ignoring its
transforming role in the class (and national) struggle. As the Mexican
Marxist-Leninists describe in this article, Marcos’ pronouncements have
led the Zapatistas deeper into a position of support for the reformist
and social-democratic forces in Mexico.

At the same time, certain reservations must be made as to this article.
First, the indigenous peoples in Mexico are treated here as ‘ethnic’
groups rather than as oppressed nationalities (particularly in section VI:
‘The problem of the land and the ethnic
question’). To ignore the fact that the indigenous peoples in Mexico
who live in their communities and have been oppressed since the time of
the Spanish conquest are oppressed nationalities is to downplay their
role and the significance of their struggle.

Furthermore, there is
a weakness in reference to the indigenous struggle, particularly the
struggle for land, and its relation to the overall revolutionary
struggle. In the last section of this article, the Mexican
Marxist-Leninists state that, even if the indigenous people are granted
territorial autonomy and carry out an agrarian reform, ‘Without the
working class coming to power, it is clear that even with such a
reform, sooner rather than later things will get worse with the
differentiation of classes in this area, a product of the laws of the
capitalist market.’ This is true, but in the sense that any reform can
be reversed as long as the bourgeoisie continues to hold state power.
The point, however, is not to use this fact to reduce the importance of
such reforms, but to use these reforms to strengthen the consciousness
and organisation of the working class and all popular classes to build
toward the fight for revolution.

With this reservation, we recommend this analysis to readers worldwide
as part of the fight to uphold the Marxist-Leninist world outlook
against all attempts to oppose it ideologically.

George Gruenthal

When the EZLN’s struggle broke out in January of 1994, our party,
and we are sure all revolutionaries in our country, hailed this event;
we could see the magnitude of the armed movement and the radicalism of
its slogans, could appreciate that this had every possibility of
becoming the pole that would unite the class struggle and contribute
enormously to awakening the working masses of town and country from
their lethargy. We stand firm in our conviction that the EZLN was
restoring the armed struggle of the masses by their actions.
Unfortunately it was soon evident that the Zapatistas reversed
themselves, they went back on their slogans, redrew their project, they
discredited the revolutionary struggle and they retreated into the arms
of social-democratic concepts to evade their responsibilities, rooting
themselves in the pettiness of the petty bourgeois patriotic dream.

The Communist Party of Mexico (Marxist-Leninist) made public its
sympathy with the armed Zapatista movement in a series of communiqués
that called on them not to turn down the volume in the struggle of the
masses and to make use of the effervescence and high spirits generated
with the perspective of a national convergence of popular opposition to
the regime and of the need for a Democratic and Popular National
Constituent Assembly. Our efforts in that period in regard to the
struggle of the masses were centred on raising that perspective.

Our organization proposed without the least hesitancy or the slightest
fear of the fact that ‘others’ were the ones who provoked the fissure
in the system, that the EZLN would be in a position to become the
unifying factor of social discontent. We understood that the EZLN was
in a position to put itself at the head of a powerful mass movement
that went beyond its initial demands, which were already greater than
those that they are raising today, since this was a war against the
regime. When we discussed this with the Zapatistas, they stuck to their
line of ‘not being the vanguard’ as a justification for leaving the
mass movement without leadership. Now that the opportunists and the
right-wing are congratulating them on such a line (moreover preaching
it on every occasion), one must remember that this has caused a great
deal of damage to the mass movement, shrinking it and diluting it for
some time.

This is a line with serious consequences, for which the Zapatistas are
directly responsible. It is a bitter truth that they cannot hide, no
matter how much they try in their sweet-sounding speeches and
campaigns. Particularly because the masses in the country to a certain
degree were expecting orientation, directives and examples of
consistent struggle.

The changes in the EZLN’s political line are not new, since the
democratic convention of 1994 when they handed over leadership of the
mass movement which they had convened to the bourgeois intelligentsia
and social-democracy, rejecting the forces that were most consistent in
defending the revolutionary line; there were many other facts of that
nature, as were shown later. They already demonstrated a continuous
abandonment of the tasks imposed by the situation generated by the
uprising, which was: to contribute to the revolutionary struggle.

With the Zapatista march to the Federal District [Mexico City] we
witnessed how the leadership of the EZLN and their supporters reached a
peak in their crusade against the revolutionary perspective, to the
satisfaction of the ruling class; naturally the class struggle does not
stop at Marcos’s will.

In the Zapatistas’ campaign with their march throughout the country,
and especially because of the interviews Marcos granted to Monsivais,
Scherer and García Márquez, the zeal with which he sounded off against
the revolutionary struggle became clear, without stopping to take
account of the major significance of this in the emancipation of the
exploited, without taking into account the contributions of the
revolutionary movement. He identified himself with the slanderous,
blackmailing and reactionary criticism of the bourgeoisie. The matter
cannot be simply forgotten; we are obliged to give an answer from the
trenches of those of us who have not fallen into the traps of bourgeois
democracy. If we now return to this once again it is because of the
Zapatista’s need to hitch themselves to such a policy that is so
unfortunate for the exploited and oppressed masses of the country.
Monsivais (yes, that intellectual enemy of the university student
movement and of everything that rings of mass struggle outside of the
bourgeois constitutional order) in an interview congratulated Marcos
for the fact that the EZLN had gone over to civilised positions; he
branded the initial objectives of the Zapatista struggle as delirious,
but when the line changed, he was delighted. Marcos agreed with him
without batting an eye and they were all happy. Monsivais was pleased
with Marcos and Marcos reinforced Monsivais. In spite of all this, our
party maintains that the slogans to which the struggle of the EZLN has
limited itself as outlined in the San Andrés accords are completely
valid, even if they would not provide a complete solution to the
problem. At the time we put them forward, what has changed is the form
of promoting them and their projection into the class struggle; now
they have become the final objective of the Zapatista movement.

With the aim of rejecting revolutionary criticism, the Zapatistas
through Marcos have a consistent formula in declaring that that is what
they have always fought for, that others either were relics of ‘old
conceptions,’ or even worse, others had made bad interpretations of
their objectives. Put this way it sounds irrefutable; they deny what
they said before and make one believe that they have taken a step
foreword into the political environment in which they now travel,
surrounded by social democrats and petty bourgeois cretinism.

This is their favourite manner of rejecting criticism of their
political inconsistency and the game they are playing with the social
democrats by discrediting the revolutionary movement in front of the
masses and nullifying its action.

I. The revolutionary struggle and Marcos the rebel

Marcos stated that it was his contact with the indigenous
communities that was the reason for losing his revolutionary
convictions, calling those convictions a ‘loss of the vocation of
death. This sounds very humanitarian and romantic, but with this he
hands over all his contingents and followers to a life dedicated to
making the capitalist system into a regime of exploitation ‘with a
human face,’ and from then on any another struggle deserves to be
rejected.

In our view it was not contact with the communities
that made him ‘understand’ the new course of the struggle, but his
incapacity to supersede the class nature of the movement to give him
greater perspective. Marcos went into the jungle as a revolutionary
element; the determining factor of his degenerating ideologically was
in the weakness of his formation (as he himself recognised), the
inability of the leadership, on the basis of the extremely tragic
situation of the indigenous masses, to politicise them based on a
proletarian outlook, and in the process of the movement, the flirtation
with social democracy and the internal and external pressures have
influenced them more, finally leading to the open rejection of the
revolutionary struggle.

According to Marcos in his interview with Julio Scherer García, ‘The
revolutionary tends to become a politician and the social rebel does
not stop being a social rebel.’ In this way he is proposing again a
very well-known thesis from the period of the guerrilla movements of
the 1970s, particularly preached by the anarchist groups of that time,
that ‘power corrupts’; that is, the masses should reject the seizure of
power, they should take the means of production into their hands (which
is really a trap in the class struggle for power). Even worse, the
masses would be unable to take the affairs of the country into their
own hands, to take power, because everything would end in corruption
and the failure of every project; they have no confidence in the power
of the masses to overcome and finally resolve any attempt to move
backward in the class struggle. The Zapatistas say they ‘reject being
the vanguard’; their rejection is more than that, they reject the
revolutionary struggle even without being the vanguard.

Of course, Marcos is not that consistent, because in his interview with
Carlos Monsivais he stated: ‘we are a serious revolutionary movement,’
although from his later rejection, it has become totally clear to all
that the leader of the EZLN and its structure has decided to exchange
revolutionary speeches for peace.

Returning to his interview, with Scherer and with Gabriel García
Márquez, the one which Subcomandante Marcos used to rave against the
revolutionaries, he made this a defining point of his social-democratic
position by stating that it is not necessary to seize power, that power
must be left to those who already have it, as this is how it is in the
world. Who does not know that the upper classes have the power? Who
does not know that in Mexico the financial oligarchy rules? Who does
not know that the politics of the legal parties is the politics of the
big bourgeoisie? Such senseless talk by the leadership of such an
important movement is shameful.

In social activity, what is not political nowadays? Fundamentally, the
Zapatista discourse tries to alienate the masses from the political
struggle, under the pretext that everything political is corrupt,
without putting this in class terms, that is, without differentiating
between bourgeois politics with all its hues and proletarian politics.
One must state dryly, Marcos is taking up social democratic politics of
the left and rejecting revolutionary politics.

Certainly, revolutionaries propose to organise the masses so that they
can wage political struggle, take power and transform their reality in
all facets of social life, contributing historically to the popular
struggles so that the masses gain certain more or less immediate
objectives, but above all so that they can raise their level of
consciousness and increase their forces in the struggle against their
oppressors. While the Zapatistas, at first very quietly, but in the end
completely openly, propose to assimilate the bourgeois slogan of making
the masses people who should only take part politically in questions
that have nothing to do with political power and the material base on
which it rests, the ownership of the means of production. At another
point of this Zapatista litany, they try to identify the radicalisation
of the movements with defeat: ‘we will not force the movement to the
point that it leads to defeat.’ This seems like a call to dignity with
which the student movement confronted the regime; the background of
this was that they refused to deepen the struggle for fear of
repression, an attitude that leads to defeatism, but which also touches
on dirty blackmail of the masses with the supposed ‘risks’ to force
them to take down their banners.

With regard to the socialist perspective in Mexico, the Zapatista
discourse followed the same patterns of classic social democratic,
revisionist and big bourgeois language; in agreement with them, it
identified socialism with the time of revisionism in power, when the
revolutionary socialist processes degenerated into state capitalism
from the middle of the 20th century until its complete bankruptcy a
decade ago. We revolutionaries accept defeats in the class struggle of
the proletariat in the process of overcoming all the historic
situations and the errors that confronted the peoples with the return
of wage slavery, with the idea that the working masses themselves and
their broader participation in all levels of struggle will block their
moves. We do not ask for the understanding of the oppressors because we
do not receive gold from Moscow, we do not call on the representatives
of the bourgeoisie who try to make us believe that there is no longer a
revolutionary struggle. We call on the masses to exercise the
revolutionary struggle to transform present society. We continue to be
conscious of the fact that the class struggle is the motive force of
history.

II. Revolutionary Violence

Violence is a fact of the class struggle. Given the antagonisms,
social classes and even more those who have a revolutionary perspective
always resort to the criticism of arms. Marcos, who embarked on a
violent movement in response to the violence of the oppressors, now
comes to give lessons of repentance, ‘Violence is always useless, but
one does not understand this until one exercises it or suffers from it’
(interview with Scherer). One should not spit into the wind. The
history of humanity has advanced by this ‘useless’ deed. What happened
to the revolutions of the slaves, the serfs, the peasants, the
bourgeoisie, the working class in history? What about the revolution
for independence of 1810, the revolution of 1910-17, or the
revolutionary guerrilla traditions in the history of our country? With
his romanticism Marcos takes us back to the old outmoded bourgeois
conception of violence as a dark symbol of human history, its black
side, denying again any class distinction between the reactionary
violence of the oppressor classes and the revolutionary violence of the
dispossessed classes. And he continues hammering, ‘clearly a soldier, I
include myself among them, is an absurd and irrational man, because he
has to resort to violence to convince someone’ (interview with
Scherer). A soldier, we say, is someone in arms in the service of a
social class, his action is determined by the needs of the class or
sector that has put him there or for which he has stood up. Even the
generals in power in Latin America are clearly maintained by the needs
of the local oppressor classes and of course by the burning needs of
the imperialists, but not by their so-called ‘evil nature.’ The
Zapatistas used arms not to convince, but to assert their interests and
to put a halt to the increasing repression and extermination to which
they had been subjected for many years. This is something that they
should not forget; the peoples of the Lacandon jungle have an urgent
need to resort to self-defence against the big landowners and the State.

In relation to other guerrilla groups, with the idea of not only
questioning ultra-left errors or positions, but of rejecting the armed
struggle, Marcos said that, ‘it is not ethical that all means are
justified’ (interview with García Márquez). This is an old trick to
which the ruling classes have resorted since the beginning of the
Mexican revolution of 1910 to discredit the armed struggle.

But this is not the end. ‘He who must resort to arms to assert his
ideas is very poor in ideas’ (interview with Scherer). That is to hit
your head against the wall; it is not just using a phrase of the regime
to combat the armed struggle, but the beginning of its abandonment,
prettified by a good dose of humanitarianism. Marcos says he is a
follower of Zapata, but how could one understand Zapata without the
armed movement that he led?

One must remember that the masses resort to armed struggle, and
especially to its highest form, the armed insurrection, not simply
because of their desperate situation, but after a long process of
struggles until they understand the significance of their aspirations
and the need to assert them in a revolutionary way, confronting the
ruling classes, being prepared to shed their blood in the struggle for
their liberation.

In this way, translating the Zapatista logic into plain language one
could say that because exploitation is a certainty in this world, and
oppression is inevitable, one must convince the whole world of this for
everything to change. But we do not try to impose our ideas of freedom
by force of arms, because then they will become very poor ideas, or
poor ideas. Such gibberish is contagious!

In summary, he would have us believe that open revolutionary struggle
has been superseded and from now on we should limit ourselves to
peaceful struggle. It is notorious that the position of the EZLN is now
fully identified with classical liberalism of the bourgeois
democracies.

They have tried to frighten the regime by stating that if the peace
process is not begun, other armed groups will arise; yes, they will
arise with or without you. This is the result of the sharpening of
class contradictions, foreseen in general terms by the development of
capitalism, and seen concretely by the anti-popular and pro-imperialist
politics of the regime.

III. The Zapatista View of Capitalism

To the praise of the bourgeoisie and the shame of the tradition of
struggle of our suffering Mexican people, the Zapatistas have brought
us an old and stale slogan, ‘We do not believe that all businessmen are
thieves, for some have earned their wealth by honourable and honest
means’ (interview with Scherer). No, this is not a Christian sermon,
where the thief is accused and the saint is rewarded. Capitalist
exploitation is not simply a question of morals or robbery, but of
social relations of production established between the owners of the
means of production in private property and those who do not own
anything but their own labour power to sell to the former. ‘Honest’
means of producing wealth do not exist; one is either a direct or
indirect exploiter. If Marcos had to give a single example of his
thesis, he would be faced with the same thing as all intellectuals of
the system, a complete absurdity. The humblest of the bosses who
crosses himself (before the Virgin of Guadalupe) must always exploit
his workers to the maximum, the banker will demand the highest profit,
the investor will seek the highest interest, the landowner wants to
maximise his rent, the cattle raiser will seek the greatest profits. It
is the law of the system.

Marcos asks for incentives for
cooperatives such as that of Tephé [an indigenous community north of
Mexico City which has built a water park on their land, attracting
Mexican tourists – translator’s note]
and ‘that their business potential be recognised, giving them
advantages and possibilities in the market which are offered to the big
hotel owners’ (interview with Scherer).

Well, to follow his logic
of vitalising those sectors, we would first have to forget that the
State today is in the service of the big monopolies. Who does not know
that? Once this ‘simple detail’ is forgotten, with the best of results,
assuming competition between hotel monopolies, what would be achieved
is to create a new monopoly that would fight to crush the small
businessmen or other small cooperatives. Why? Because the search for
the greatest profits reigns, because without this they would succumb to
the competition, because the social relations of capitalist production
in their monopoly phase reign.

In case one tries to make them into small or medium-sized businesses
with financial stability, they would again be faced with the constant
threat of being devoured or subordinated to the more powerful ones. The
independent companies in a monopolised branch create a factor of
instability for the companies that dominate that branch and the
independent companies always come into conflict with the prices and
profits of the monopolies. By forgetting this Marcos fell into the trap
of the regime which consists in promoting (in appearance) policies
favourable to the small bourgeoisie, which in fact are subject to the
whirlpool of big capital.

However it may be under the capitalist mode of production, by the law
of the extraction of surplus value and the law of accumulation, the
cooperatives in the Zapatista program will end up exploiting labour
power, as the Pascual, the Excelsior and many others, or being cruelly
subjected to elimination.

In the case of the small bourgeoisie and the cooperativists the main
task is to integrate them into the democratic and revolutionary
struggle to transform the present relations of production and to
integrate them into a productive life where they do not become
exploiters of the worker.

But this latter is not the expectation designed by the Zapatistas; for
them what is at stake are: ‘the possibilities of constructing another
type of relation, even within the market, which do not represent savage
capitalism where some are devoured by others’ (interview with Scherer).
This is also not new; it is a repetition of the social-democratic
proposal for a ‘third way.’ Imperialist Europe is experiencing it;
however the ‘domestication of the forces of capitalism’ has not brought
about more than a change in the form of speech that obscures the
significance of the capitalist market. The capitalists do not make
economic or military war because they are evil, but only out of the
need to survive. It is difficult to believe that Marcos really does not
know this, or that the rest of the social-democrats, who are aiming to
win the sympathies of the oligarchy, do not know this.

It is important to point out our differences especially on the question
of the relations between the national oligarchy and imperialism, for
the Zapatistas through Marcos recognise that the former will be
devoured by the imperialists. In this sense, the dynamics of imperial
rule in general always aims to consent to the national oligarchies, for
the sake of being allowed to be guaranteed in the strategic sectors
fundamental to consolidate their international control. The imperial
rule over our country is based on the strategic alliance of
subordination between the international financial oligarchy and the
national financial oligarchy.

The Zapatista interpretation of capitalism is not as novel as some
proclaim; those who state that Marxism is obsolete revive the most
backward economist and populist theories, flavouring them with
social-democratic discourse, but they have nothing new to offer. All
they do is reveal their own class nature, sticking to them to this,
they try to generalise the slightest social development.

The social-democratic discourse in the EZLN’s version follows:
‘recognizing differences’ are the new magic words to obliterate the
existing contradictions. The meaning of this is very elastic, and
acceptable to almost everyone; the Zapatistas speak of recognizing us
as all being different and living in harmony, in the land of humankind.
But humankind lives according to historic patterns which cannot be
discarded; we recognise the differences between possessors and
dispossessed, between exploited and exploiters, between oppressed and
oppressors, but do we accept them? This is incompatible with our
perspective of struggle.

Finally, we believe it is our obligation to give the lie to a grave
error in the lessons that Marcos draws from the history of the 20th
century, when he says: ‘When we declare that the new century and the
new millennium are the millennium and century of differences, we are
making a fundamental break with the 20th century: the great struggle of
the hegemonic powers. The last struggle that we remember, between the
socialist and the capitalist camp, led to two world wars. If this is
not recognised, the world will end up being an archipelago in
continuous war within and outside its territories. It will not be
possible to live in this way’ (interview with Scherer). We should make
clear three points:

The struggle for world hegemony is a
present-day matter, in which all the capitalist powers spurred on by
their great transnational monopolies are involved, but also one in
which North American power prevails.

The world wars
originated from the nature of the imperialist phase of capitalism for
world domination; the First World War began before the proletarian
revolution of 1917, the second had its cause in German expansionism
that came to question English rule. To say that these wars were due to
contradictions between socialism and capitalism is to follow in the
footsteps of all that nebulous propaganda that tried to cleanse the
capitalist powers of blame, above all the Western powers, who were the
ones that pushed Germany (in the case of the Second World War) to fight
against the former USSR.

The world is already an archipelago
at war for a new division of spheres of influence around the great
Atlantic Alliance (NATO). We are seeing the scenes of war constantly
shifting from one point of the globe to another; each time the
imperialists run into more difficulties. The Atlantic Alliance is
trying to prolong its existence by fighting against the countries that
are not incorporated into it, but its internal contradictions,
especially between Europe and North America, are heightened and turn
into bitter disputes over who will get the greater share of the
multiple booties of war.

IV. Marcos and his idea of legality

‘We call on one of the forces to assume its role, the Congress of
the Union’ (interview with Monsivais). Already the ideologist of
present-day Zapatismo has forgotten the role that to date the merchants
of the chambers play in the life of the country, they have already
forgotten the role played by parliament to negate the EZLN. We see here
how they have linked themselves to an organ that is not of the people,
but of the owning classes, an instrument of bourgeois democracy. This
call is dangerous not only from the viewpoint of the search for a
solution to their demands, but of the illusions that it created in the
masses, since it promotes confidence in an organ of the dictatorship of
capital. And what do the Zapatistas now say with regard to the
consummation of the Indigenous Law? What role did the Congress of the
Union play? Things will go badly by promoting such illusions, since
despite the facts the Zapatistas go to the extreme of stating that
there are only three people who show bad will towards them. After this
they will again flirt with the forces of the left to dazzle them once
more with new demonstrations of their legalism.

But earlier, in his notorious interviews he has already stated without blushing in the least that:

‘For us it is very important that the nation should say: 'I assume
it and I put it in writing; I make history. I recognize that everything
that has taken place before was not good. Not only do I recognize this,
but I will make every effort to ensure that this will not happen again’
(interview with Monsivais). Oh Marcos! Who leads the nation, little
brother? The fact that things were not good sounds like the classic
bourgeois lament: let’s start with a new slate. To put it this way is
to place the solution of the indigenous and peasant question in the
hands of the ruling classes, giving the message to all the people that
this is also a viable solution for their demands.

‘The EZLN is not
asking that the whole Army must leave before negotiations. We ask Fox
to answer this question: Are you willing to enter into negotiations and
to abandon a military solution? Are you the commander of the Army?’ The
Zapatistas here fall into Fox’s populism. Fox is a representative of
the oligarchy, his actions are subordinate to the strategy of bourgeois
domination, and obviously, to the pressure that the masses can exercise
against that. Therefore, it is not the will of the president that will
resolve such a serious situation.

In his interview with Scherer, he says: ‘We propose to try to convince
this government, not only Fox, that they can sit down with the
certainty that there will be results if they take this seriously.’ We
have seen enough of this already; now it is the ‘good will’ of the
Zapatistas added to a policy of shady deals worthy of professional
mercenaries.

V. The Zapatista view of the masses and their struggles

The Zapatista concept of the masses and their struggle is not
notably different from the classical social-democratic view. Why should
it be? For the Zapatistas society, more than being divided into
classes, is divided into the State, the military and civilians. The
Zapatistas never call on the working masses and the popular sectors for
their support, but on ‘civil society’, that broad spectrum of oppressor
and oppressed classes in the old Hegelian language that has long ago
been superceded by Marxism. However, it has again been dredged up,
first by social democracy to prevent the masses from looking at classes
and to try to unite what cannot be united in the class struggle, rather
than to do the opposite, to continuously help to separate the workers
and peasants from the bourgeoisie and their pernicious influence.

They are especially trying to raise the banner of the so-called ‘new
social actors’, who have been brought into the struggle in the last
decades and who have been exalted by social-democracy in opposition to
the working class in their role of vanguard. These new actors, with
their special problems, who are part of various classes or class
sectors, are influenced by openly petty bourgeois and deeply
individualist positions and forms of life. They are trying to take them
aside to a marginalised struggle from the strategic point of view,
alienating them from their exploited and oppressed condition by the
system in most cases. In civilian society, as has been shown above, the
EZLN encourages parliamentary cretinism, reformism and bourgeois and
petty bourgeois constitutionalism, and all kinds of actions that ‘do
not shake up’ the masses or lead them to confront their oppressors in a
revolutionary manner.

A serious mistake that Marcos made in the Federal District was when he
called on the students to concentrate on the studies and to postpone
their struggles until they had gotten their degrees. Immediately the
opportunist sectors and reaction applauded this ‘brilliant’ suggestion.
Of course this is not the first time that the Zapatistas fell into the
opportunist swamp in the student movement; during the strike, at a
specific moment they gave their support to the moderate groups. We call
on the students not to pay attention to such nonsense; our party calls
on them to fight, to absorb the great experiences in their
demonstrations and to push for revolutionary action from their
trenches, so that at the end of their studies they have a clearer
consciousness and broader horizons of struggle.

VI. The problem of the land and the ethnic question

The central problem of the Zapatista struggle, as much as they may
present it as an indigenous question, is materially speaking the
problem of the land, and sociologically one of ethnicity.

The
indigenous communities were systematically pushed deep into the jungle
by the landowners, for whom the main thing is to have them available as
labour power for the harshest tasks. (In the same way other indigenous
peoples in our country were pushed into the most inaccessible and
unhealthy areas.) The real solution to the problems of the Zapatista
communities must begin with a broad agrarian reform that returns to
these people their former territories and the infrastructure needed to
overcome their historic backwardness, as well as granting them
territorial autonomy. Without the working class coming to power, it is
clear that even with such a reform, sooner rather than later things
will get worse with the differentiation of classes in this area, a
product of the laws of the capitalist market. Besides let us not forget
the existence of a pole of economic and political power which will
crush them even if Zapatismo obtains certain considerable benefits.

Marcos maintains that ‘the fundamental thing in our struggle is the
demand for indigenous rights and culture’ (interview with Monsivais).
This is a false point; all this would be lost without material
livelihood for the indigenous peasants. First they must own the means
of production, and then the demand for indigenous territorial autonomy
must be raised, in order to raise the ethnic groups in the general
development of their life. If one raises only the demand for
territorial autonomy, even if the bourgeoisie today does not want to
yield on this, they may do this under certain circumstances. However,
that autonomy by itself would still be amputated because it would be
limited to an area with an independent administration with political
powers for the ethnic groups as such, leaving intact the large private
property in the land, and of course, the indigenous ethnic groups could
not develop with such an enemy at their side. Besides, there would
remain unsolved the problem of what the Zapatistas understand as rights
and culture, since in the present-day terms that they have been using,
it is a question of the right to exploit each other.

This petty bourgeois view of the indigenous problem has given rise to
indigenous theory, sometimes presented as a problem of races. But it is
rather a question of the systematic oppression of the ethnic groups in
our country, expropriating their land eliminating all the agents who
impede the capitalist relations of exploitation.

Although racism is an undeniable fact, it parts from those concepts. If
we look outside our country, we see that the Japanese, who are not a
white race, are accepted as such because they are an advanced
capitalist society. Also it is not a problem of races since even the
indigenous people have assimilated mestizo, black and white elements
into their social activity as an ethnic group; they share a common life
and a similar psychology, but not necessarily the same blood. Nowadays
there is no more pure blood among the ethnic groups, and in spite of
this the problem persists, and the ethnic groups also persist as
historic social beings.

On the other hand, the Zapatistas have forgotten the thousands and
thousands of indigenous people (separated not just in the last
generation, but even several generations ago) who take part in the
general social activity of the country, and are immersed in all the
strata of capitalist society, exploiters and exploited, oppressors and
oppressed. White, mestizo, Indian, black, Arabs, Asians, etc. make up
the blood stream of our country. Moreover, without leaving this
question aside, one must analyse the breakdown of social classes:
bourgeois, proletarians, peasants, semi-proletarians and other middle
strata. In the same way the ethnic groups have their class breakdown,
in accord with the place that their members occupy in production: as
exploiters, peasants, peons, day-labourers (agricultural proletariat)
and artisans. They are subjected to a worse situation because of their
ethnic oppression caused by the ruling class. These qualities should
guide us in participating in their struggles, fundamentally their class
nature, the particularity of the ethnic social organisation.

In the view of our party, even though the problem of the land and the
question of ethnic territorial autonomy are problems which cannot be
postponed, the guarantee that the ethnic problem would be fundamentally
and decisively solved is by incorporating the ethnic groups into the
struggle for socialism.

Our party does not reject a peaceful solution favourable to the
Zapatista problem and to the mass movement itself, but this will not
come from the defeatist line presently put forward, but by propelling
the struggle of the masses. It is not a matter of simply signing a just
peace agreement, but (if necessary) of making a dignified retreat in
the armed struggle, without rejecting this, nor the class struggle in
general.

As long as the Zapatistas continue along the line of abandoning the
consistent struggle and are tied to all those groups in so-called civil
society that are unable to take up a serious fight against the system,
the results will not be favourable to the masses that they mobilise.

The Zapatistas and their leadership should see the nature of the
capitalist system as it is, not in the light of indigenous
subjectivism, and break with the concepts that seek to unleash the
forces of capital within the ethnic groups. Otherwise, the tiger
will make them swallow the mirrors and not the other way around as, they once preached.